Live Stock Breeders' Associatio7i. 75 



In this case I was prevented from doing this, as I did not believe 

 that the children would get the book nor that the father would 

 buy it. So I had to devise some other way of teaching. We were 

 in a community which had been settled among the early settlements 

 01 America by the French, and it was a place where the tide waters 

 of the Bay oi Funday rose high at certain times, and then for about 

 two v.eelcs they would not rise so high, so that the tide brought up 

 with it a de^.osit which settled there, and this was left bare during 

 low tides ; then the tide would come up again and overflow every- 

 thing, and then recede again. When the French settled there, they 

 had placed dykes around these tracts and made thousands of acres 

 cf land the richest on earth by thus keeping off the tides. I was 

 teaching in a community with m-uch land of that sort. The father 

 of my pupils had to deal with this kind of land. I saw that the 

 best way to teach these boys would be to make them understand 

 that they were studying the history of their own community. So 

 I just gathered the boys about my desk and began to talk about 

 their own farms, and found that they knew much about them — 

 they knew m.ore than a teacher would who might have attempted 

 to teach them agriculture. I began by raising questions as t^ 

 Vv-hat their soil was best adapted for, and why and how drained, 

 and finally about this matter of the dykes and who erected them. 

 One boy said his grandfather had owned the land — that he had 

 come from another point and bought it. Finally one boy said: "I 

 think the French diked it." I inquired who the French were, and 

 he had a vague notion v/ho they were. Thus our work in history 

 was started and these boys made rapid strides in learning colonial 

 history. I tell this to illustrate how the life right at home may 

 open the way and lead the pupil to take an interest in human life 

 in general, and lead him to an appreciation of the larger life of 

 the world outside. I don't believe we need to abolish the simple 

 lural school — we should improve it. 



But there is another phase of school work that I want to touch 

 lipon : We used to think that when a pupil had passed through the 

 seventh or eighth grade of the district school that he had an educa- 

 tion. We have ceased to think that now. The world today de- 

 mands a more extensive education than that, and I am sure that 

 those of you whose children are going to stay on the farm v/ant 

 them to know m.cre about the world and how to improve methods 

 of farming in which they are engaged. That will call for the 

 development of the high school, and the high school in the rural 

 com.munity can also be easily gotten. We already have a law pro- 



